I am considering a change to the way maintenance facilities work for C# Aurora so I thought I would seek feedback first
At the moment, if you have 100 maintenance facilities (for example) you can maintain ships of up to 20,000 tons. Furthermore, you can maintain any number of ships of 20,000 tons or less. There are a couple of drawbacks with this approach:
1) It can be quite difficult to build sufficient maintenance facilities to maintain very large ships and it is often easier to build several smaller ones instead.
2) It is very easy to maintain large numbers of small ships (one of the reasons that fighters are excluded from maintenance facilities).
For C# Aurora I am considering changing maintenance facilities so that each one has a much higher capacity (perhaps 1000 - 2000 tons instead of 200 tons). However, additional ships would require additional capacity. For example, 100,000 tons of capacity could maintain a single 100,000 ton ship, five 20,000 ton ships or twenty 5000 ton ships (or any combination).
If there are insufficient facilities available, the maintenance clock on ships at the facility would be based on the missing capacity. For example, if a population had 100,000 tons of capacity and 150,000 tons of military shipping was present, all ships would advance their clocks at 1/3rd normal speed. (200,000 tons of ships would be 1/2 speed, 400,000 tons would be 3/4 speed, etc.).
There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach:
1) It is much more realistic and larger fleet bases would be much more valuable.
2) It will be a lot easier to maintain very large ships
3) I can lift the restriction on fighters using maintenance facilities.
4) It would remove the maintenance advantages of small ships vs large ones.
5) It would be less obvious whether a ship could be fully maintained at a given population (although I would add a tab to the Economics window to track this in detail for each population)
In this situation, I would add a tech line that increased the capacity of maintenance facilities. I might also consider having some form of auto-overhaul if the maintenance facilities had excess capacity vs the ships in port (based on the amount of excess capacity vs total size of ships), which would remove some of the micromanagement for overhaul.
Comments?